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America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union. By Fergus M. Borde wich. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012. Pp. 496. Cloth, $30.00)
Reviewed by Erik J. Chaput
Journalist Fergus Bordewich, the author of five previous books, including Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2006), an engaging narrative history of the Underground Railroad, has produced a richly detailed and beautifully written account of a pivotal moment in American history that all too often simply receives a paragraph or two in broader accounts of the antebellum period. It is important to note at the outset that America's Great Debate, though engaging, does not alter the traditional narrative of how the compromise measure worked its way through Congress, in terms of the Omnibus Bill that eventually emerged out of Clay's proposals (against his wishes) to settle the sectional turmoil and Senator Stephen A. Douglas's repackaging of the Omnibus into separate, more passable bills.
America's Great Debate is the second book to appear in recent years on the Compromise of 1850.1 Bordewich, however, casts his net wider than Robert Remini's 2010 volume to incorporate a host of characters often glossed over. Indeed, the personalities of the major figures involved matter, and Bordewich sets up to capture this important episode in American history in all its complexity. Using a variety of sources, including the Santa Fe Papers at the Texas State Library; the Zachary Taylor Papers at the University of Kentucky; the published papers of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun; and, of course, the Congressional Globe, Bordewich traces the...